ABSTRACT
The two volumes reviewed here, and a third entitled Trois Etudes sur !'Arabie romaine et byzantine,' are the published results of the author's these de doctorat d'Etat at Lyons, begun in 1969 under the supervision of Jean Pouilloux and completed in May, 1978. The three volumes went to press simultaneously; the narrative history of Bostra was unduly delayed. Trois Etudes investigated aspects of the history of provincia Arabia in general terms: the provincial borders, the Jasti of governors, and Roman contact with their client-kings, ethnarchs, phylarchs and the federated tribes within and without imperial domains. It thus stands apart from the epigraphic and narrative histories of the provincial capital represented by the two volumes under review. The inscriptions and the history of Bostra naturally form an integrated unit-in the words of the editorjauthor, "ces deux volumes sont indissolublement lies et ant ete conc;us comme un tout." Hence the inclusion of both in this review, "Ins." referring to pages in the volume of inscriptions, * to a specific inscription, and "Nar." to the historical synthesis. The IGLS Series
In a communication to an archaeological congress on 9 April 1926 Rene Mouterde offered a summary of the work then done on the corpus of Greek and Latin inscriptions from French-mandate Syria. 2 The IGLS was the brainchild of Louis Jalabert, who announced it to a similar congress in 1905. Jalabert had enlisted the aid of Rudolph Brunnow in the initial stages of the project, and indeed it was Briinnow who pulled the laboring oar up to the moment of his premature death in 1917.3 Mouterde secured
Briinnow's epigraphic ftchier after World War I, and stepped into the role of collaborator with Jalabert. The latter seems to have maintained his own position as silent partner in the IGLS enterprise.
